Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

As Leopold notes, “the blur of communications has progressed from letters and e-mails to texts, tweets and Instagram pictures. Long, detailed speeches have turned into clips, then sound bites, then Vines, Snapchat and animated GIFs. Yes, we’re adjusting to an image-intensive, brevity-favoring world, a world as close and available as our smartphone. It’s a fast-growing, hugely popular world that rewards short attention spans.

Instagram was born in 2010; as of June, it has 130 million monthly active users and 45 million photos posted per day. Vine, the six-second video app introduced by the Twitter folks in January, became the iTunes app store’s most popular free download within three months. It had 13 million users as of June, and its most active users post more than 14 Vines per day. Not to be outdone, Instagram launched its own short-video feature in June.

Users of Snapchat, a messaging platform popular with teens, exchange 200 million pictures a day. President Obama’s campaign used a Twitter photo to express thanks after his 2012 re-election; it became the most popular tweet in Twitter’s history. Danny DeVito sends out photo- bombing pictures of his ‘troll foot’ at every opportunity. Creative types have used Vine and Instagram to create memes, jokes and art. All this gives new meaning to the Internet rule, ‘Pics or it didn’t happen.’”

About the Author

Wheeler Winston Dixon, Ryan Professor of Film Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is an internationally recognized scholar and writer of film history, theory and criticism. He is the author of thirty books and more than 100 articles on film, and appears regularly in national media outlets discussing film and culture trends. Frame by Frame is a collection of his thoughts on a number of those topics. All comments by Dixon on this blog are his own opinions. To contact Prof. Dixon for an interview, reach him at wdixon1@unl.edu or wheelerwinstondixon.com